Best 1141 quotes in «historical quotes» category

I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.

I've managed to include only enough historical detail to give the "flavor" of the time period while keeping the characters and story focal.

I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.

Ive spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.

I've worked a lot of historical stuff back in Sweden and there's always conflict with horses. I get a bit paranoid when I'm on them, and they can sense that and they get a bit paranoid. It ends up in this bad spiral where I don't want to be on them, and they don't want me on their backs.

I want to scare the hell out of the rest of the world.

I was as secretive - indeed, as furtive - as any conspirator. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.

I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'.

I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.

I will begin to remove our troops from Iraq immediately.

I will give you my definition of a nation, and you can add the adjective 'Jewish.' A Nation is, in my mind, an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy. Then, if you add to that the word 'Jewish' you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation.

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

I wouldn't mind spending six months a year having a private jet take me around the world to visit natural and historical landmarks like the Egyptian pyramids, Mount Kilimanjaro or the Taj Mahal.

I write both, as you know, dozens of ecological and social scientific and historical works, dozens of novels. It's hard to describe a novel that grapples with the horrors of World War II as anything but grueling. But Codex Orféo is somehow...well, I hope, riveting for readers. Deeply provocative. Cinematic in a nearly surreal sense.

Judaism is an historical religion.

Juliet is one of those rare novels that has it all: lush prose, tightly intertwined parallel narratives, intrigue, and historical detail all set against a backdrop of looming danger. Anne Fortier casts a new light on one of history's greatest stories of passion. I was swept away.

Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.

Justice in holdings is historical; it depends upon what actually has happened. We shall return to this point later.

Just look at Poland, a sort of European perspective this has. So we have an interest in seeing this relationship be a good one. We have a lot of historical ties of course, a history that we share. But this mustn't keep us from wherever we feel there are very grave differences of opinion to raise them with them.

Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being.

Kafka was a complex character in a complex historical era. In order to understand him, you have to do more than cite facts. It is necessary to connect the facts in a meaningful way. His relationship to Judaism, to his father, to women, to literature - all of this is interconnected; and there are decisive moments in his life, in which such interactions suddenly become visible and can be experienced in an almost sensuous manner. It is these moments above all that I try to narrate dramatically.

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.

I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home, we will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.

Laugh my friend, for laughter ignites a fire within the pit of your belly and awakens your being.

Lemberger's stories are marvelous compounds of scholarship, imagination and empathy. Brought to life with rich historical detail, these biblical women, sidelined and silenced for centuries, prove to be audacious, utterly relatable, and spellbinding companions.

Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs.

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Life cannot be destroyed for good, neithercan history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and uniquesomething truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

Just because a company falls doesn't invalidate what we can learn by studying that company when it was at its historical best.

Like, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.

Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.

Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.

Many of America's historical cornbreads were staple breads for people who didn't have many other options.

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

Lincoln would be just like me. He wouldn't know what the hell to do.

Lore is my favorite kind of story. Because it's not only historical, it's a lie everyone knows is a lie but tells anyway. I love that. Of course every story I tell is true. Completely true. Completely and utterly at least five-eighths of the way to being true, which is truer than any piece of lore and truer than most truths you'll hear.

Mankind can live free in a society hemmed in by laws, but we have yet to find a historical example of mankind living free in lawless anarchy.

Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.

Mathematics is one of the most basic -- and most ancient -- types of knowledge. Yet the details of its historical development remain obscure to all but a few specialists.

Marxism must abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form. It is at its best when butting heads in self-criticism, and in historical thunder and lightning, it retains its strength.

Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles places the loyalist experience and the aftermath of the American Revolution in an entirely new light. Alongside the Spirit of 1776, Jasanoff gives us the Spirit of 1783, dedicated to remaking the mighty British Empire, and then offers a stunning reinterpretation of the Loyalists' complicated role in that remaking. Her meticulously researched and superbly written account is historical revision at its finest, and it affirms her place as one of the very finest historians of the rising generation.

McIntosh is persuasive in his arguments that the scientific facts of evolution cannot stand alone ... science shows that historical evolution, whatever its contingencies, is itself on a trajectory of values development. McIntosh has well-researched his sources and integrated them with seminal insight.

Memmius would only be useless to him for a short time, but that he would remain useless to himself and the Republic forever.

Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.

Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.